NAA 2026 Debrief: AI Everywhere, Automation Under Pressure, and the Human Work of Multifamily

Attending this year’s Apartmentalize (which was truly excellent, by the way), you couldn’t help but notice a contrast. 

On the one hand, the vendor floor was an absolute sea of AI and agentic technology marketing. AI banners, AI leasing agents, AI assistants, AI automation, and intelligent workflow ads were lit up, built high, and blared out for Multifamily’s eyes and ears. Which is fair. Absolutely everyone supporting the Multifamily industry—including us at Conservice—is investing in this tech. It’s understandable that the industry wants to be loud and proud about it. 

But in the Apartmentalize sessions we attended, a much more nuanced perspective on AI emerged. From operator-driven panels to case study deep dives and even AI-tech led breakout sessions, a series of anxieties and expectations ruled the stages:

• Multifamily is deeply anxious about AI’s propensity for errors when not directly leveraged and supported by human expertise.
• The industry is tired of hype and is far more interested in measurable results and outcomes.
• The general sentiment? AI-supported tech can reduce friction, speed up repetitive tasks, and support teams, but it cannot fix broken processes, unclear ownership, or bad data. Automating a messy workflow just makes the mess move faster.

To be clear, the excitement makes sense. AI has enormous potential for multifamily. Used well, it can reduce repetitive work, surface risk, improve decision-making, and give already-stretched operators more room to focus on the human work that builds resident trust. And our industry is far from the only industry that is anxious to implement the tech. Stanford’s HAI’s 2025 AI Index Report found that 78% of organizations reported using AI in 2024, up from 55% the year before. We believe in that potential.

Automating a messy workflow just makes the mess move faster.

But the tension at NAA was hard to miss. The vendor floor was full of big promises about what AI can do, while the sessions were full of operators asking sharper questions about what AI should do, what it requires, where it breaks, and how to keep it from making complicated work even more complicated. Multifamily is not rejecting AI or new technology. But based on the vibes at this year’s conference, the industry is becoming more discerning about the buzz. AI for AI’s sake is not the future. People-centric, outcome-driven, data-supported AI is.

Automation Is Not a Shortcut. It’s an Operations Test.

The cleanest automation pitch goes something like this: take repetitive work, hand it to technology, free up your people, improve the experience, save time, cue applause. And yes, that can happen. But across the sessions we attended, speakers repeatedly returned to a less magical and more useful truth: automation only works when the workflow underneath it is already understood. Otherwise, you’re not eliminating complexity. You’re hiding it behind a login screen.

Multifamily teams are navigating rising resident expectations, tighter margins, staffing constraints, maintenance labor shortages, and portfolio pressure all at once. Everyone is asking some version of the same question: how do we use technology to support people instead of quietly making their jobs weirder?

The technology is not the point. The workflow is the point. This was reflected in NAA’s own automation programming. The “Operational Excellence in the Age of Automation” session focused on high-impact workflows, implementation roadmaps, resident experience goals, and measurable outcomes. In that same session, one attendee poll found that leasing follow-up was the top workflow that operators would automate first at 42%, followed by maintenance requests at 37%. Which tracks. Leasing is the core business, and maintenance is where resident trust can disappear in a hurry.

THE KEY TAKEAWAY: Automation should make good operations easier to repeat. It should not be used to disguise broken workflows, bad data, or unclear ownership.

Residents Are Getting Tired of “Helpful” Technology

There’s a fascinating generational divide emerging among Multifamily residents and their relationship with AI. While millennial residents have had the most legacy optimism for emerging AI tech, baby boomers and Gen Z are both increasingly skeptical of the value that AI-apartment tech will create for them.

Use AI where speed matters and humans where trust matters.

In the session “Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bot,” speakers presented on a resident poll that showed interest in apartment communities using new technology had steadily risen from 2015 to 2025, then dropped hard. When asked why, the top answer was blunt: too much tech. 

Based on poll results, Gen Z and Baby Boomers both showed skepticism toward technology when it felt impersonal or obstructive. Residents do not care how advanced your stack is if the experience feels worse. One of the strongest summaries from the sessions was simple: use AI where speed matters and humans where trust matters. AI can handle after-hours inquiries, lead nurturing, routine follow-ups, and high-volume communication points. But renewals, escalations, frustration, maintenance failures, billing concerns, and anything involving trust are relationship moments.

THE KEY TAKEAWAY: Resident technology has to earn its place. The best human-tech blend uses automation to remove friction, not create a maze residents have to solve before they can reach a person.

AI Still Needs Adults in the Room

Last year, the multifamily AI conversation had already moved past “Is this coming?” and into “How fast can we use it?” This year, the conversation matured. Or maybe sobered up? Roughly 40 out of 103 NAA sessions included AI, agentic tools, or automation in the description, and NAA’s official Apartmentalize page says the event includes over 100 education sessions and nearly 700 exhibitors. In other words, the conference really was a concentrated snapshot of the industry’s current anxieties and ambitions.

AI is not replacing BI.

But the more useful conversations were about where AI breaks. AI can be incredibly helpful and incredibly wrong with the same level of confidence. It can hallucinate numbers, misunderstand context, and produce different answers for different people asking what sounds like the same question. That is a real problem in multifamily, where words like leased, occupied, preleased, effective rent, renewal, exposure, delinquency, and availability can carry very specific meanings depending on the company, platform, market, and report.

So no, AI is not replacing BI (Business Intelligence). AI can analyze data, visualize patterns, accelerate research, and make information more accessible. But it does not 

• Automatically understand your business
• Reconcile messy inputs
• Understand which version or framing of reality your organization has agreed to use 

This is why clean data matters. This is why context matters. This is why process matters. And this is why human expertise is not a temporary bridge to some fully automated future.

The property management industry’s own AI data reinforces our collective exposure to the tech. According to IREM and AppFolio’s 2025 report, “AI on the Rise: Adoption in Property Management Gains Traction,” a survey of 1,827 property management and real estate professionals found that AI adoption more than doubled in 18 months. The report also found that 85% of AI users were using general-purpose AI tools, while only 66% were using AI features built into core property management software. That is encouraging, but it also underscores the governance challenge: consistency, training, security, and data hygiene matter a lot.

Resident Living’s Brad Kirshenbaum put it best when he pointedly asked the audience a question in the Smarter By Design: Using AI to Enhance Decision Making panel:

“Do you trust everyone across your organization to prompt the exact right way to get the exact right answer? Probably not. That does not mean AI is useless. It means expertise matters more, not less.

THE KEY TAKEAWAY: AI can accelerate decision-making, but it cannot replace data discipline, operational context, or human expertise. The companies that win with AI will be the ones honest enough to manage it.

The One Common Thread: Purpose Over Hype

The connective tissue across this year’s NAA sessions was not anti-technology. The industry needs technology, automation, AI, better data, faster workflows, and more scalable ways to operate increasingly complex portfolios. But the tone has changed. Operators are no longer impressed by technology that simply exists. Residents are no longer delighted by portals that create more steps. Teams are no longer fooled by AI tools that move work from one place to another and call it innovation.

The market is asking better questions now. Does this make the resident experience easier? Does our data support it? Can we maintain it? Can we measure whether it actually worked?

Anyone selling a one-size-fits-all solution is, once again, selling wind. Multifamily operations are too complex, too local, too regulated, too resident-facing, and too dependent on human judgment for generic answers to hold up.

That is a reality we know intimately on the utility side. Utility management lives at the intersection of automation, resident experience, regulation, data accuracy, vendor coordination, cost control, and human support. Owners need visibility. Teams need fewer manual burdens. Everyone needs the numbers to be right. That is why our own approach to AI is grounded in something more durable than novelty. AI has to be people-centric, outcome-driven, and supported by clean data. 

Curious how Conservice is helping multifamily teams simplify utility operations? Reach out. We’d love to chat.

Check our conversation with NAA CEO and President, Bob Pinnegar, on the Utility Wisdom podcast.